Yes. The financial decisions I made when I was 10 were really stupid. :smack: Thank you for enlightening me. Knew I shouldn’t have majored in Journalism.
My fault - I assumed you were close to retirement, since you were so mad about it.
I’m in my early 30s as well, and I am not counting on SS at all. I’m trying to structure my finances to provide what I need from my own money.
You may want to do the same, because I’m pretty sure that, once we hit our 50s or so, SS as it is now will cease to exist.
It’s not the IRS, it’s the SSA.
There was a vote, it happened in Congress. In 1983, as a matter of fact.
If you’re just finding out about it now, you’re about 25 years too late to complain.
Sateryn76, I’ve done the best that I can but here’s what’s working against me: I started out in life (post-college) with a bunch of student loan debt and came from a blue collar background – my parents received pensions and retirement plans and all that stuff, so they never even thought to advise me to set up my own nest egg. Between that and trying to pay for my own car and rent and food… on a journalism major’s salary, it’s been all I could do just to get all the bills paid. 20 years out of school (I am 40 for two more weeks) and I finally own my house, have an IRA and a separate 401(k) and automatic direct deposits into a cash savings account. But I had to dig myself out of a hole for a long time. So I could never figure out, if I can barely make enough to buy groceries for the week, exactly how was I supposed to restructure my finances to provide what I need from my own money? I still don’t really make enough to be very confident about setting myself up.
But no, I am not counting on SS to be there when I finally drop dead at work. I’ve never married, don’t have kids, and there is not a single relative within three generations who has anything at all that I would stand to inherit, so either I will keep working until I drop dead at work or I will be that freaky old lady buying cases of cat food at the grocery store. I have no safety net whatsoever, besides whatever little bits and kibbles I can stash away when I’m not paying the mortgage or something.
I just get mad as hell when decisions are made for me and choices are removed from me without my knowledge or consent. I also cannot understand why I seem to be the only person who is incensed and outraged by this secret back room bump to age 67 retirement. I didn’t agree to that. The IRS just TOLD me what I was going to do and I have no say in the matter. That makes me stabby and filled with grrr.
Oh, right, the SSA. They send that statement after tax time, so I always associate it with the IRS.
The vote in 1983 explains why I didn’t know anything about it and didn’t agree to it: I was 14 in 1983. Freshman in high school. Not even old enough to vote about decisions being made about my own future. Foiled by the Regan/Bush era once again, dammit! :mad:
For those born after 1960-ish, yes. To me a bigger issue is the minimum age going from 62 to 65. Full retirement going from 67 to 70 is bothersome but not as much as raising the minimum SS age. I know several people counting the days to 62 and hoping their savings last because they can’t find a job. Not sure what they are supposed to do if they need to wait another 3 years. And even though, by and large people live longer and healthier I still know several people whose bodies are already worn to a nub by age 61. So expecting them to work to 70 isn’t going to work.
If you let people control their own choices, nobody could retire. That is why the gov. has to force people to spend 6.2% of gross income and their employer to match it to fund their retirement.
Yep, they screwed us before most of those affected had the right to vote.
We will just have to do the same to the following generations so that WE can have OUR payments!
Do you honestly believe that “nobody” is responsible enough to control their own choices, and no one would prepare for retirement? Really?
That speaks volumes about your faith in the intelligence of the human race. Just do me a favor - leave me out of it. I’d be happy to get 25% of what I’ve paid in to SS today, and quit the program entirely.
And then for your follow up question, explain how the same number of people and the same number of jobs equals greater unemployment.
Gee, economics sure is hard!
Advocates of increased retirement ages often use the concept of percent of life in retirement. For example, say life expectancy is 60 years and retirement age is 55. This means that on average a person will spend 5/60 = 8.3% of their life in retirement (or 91.7% of their life “not in retirement”). If life expectancy increases to 80 years, the new retirement age would be 91.7% x 80 years = 73.3 years, which provides an average of 6.7 years of retirement.
The basic idea is that the ratio of work years to retirement years remains relatively constant, and the benefits of increased life expectancy should be shared between society as a whole (by requiring individuals work longer) and by individuals themselves (by increasing their retirement years). Naturally, exactly how to cut the pie is a source of considerable debate.
The above example is an admitted simplification, but hopefully it illustrates the general idea.
Tell that to all the people in their 50s and 60s who’ve had their financial decisions take a hit in the crotch by the stock market collapse over the last two years. Yes, most of the value has come back, but we’ve had two years of saving essentially wiped off the books.
What were our alternatives? Put everything in bonds? Not only were “safe” bonds returning less than the rate of inflation, but a hell of a lot of “safe” bonds (e.g., General Motors) turned out to be less than safe. Buy gold? Cyclical swings in the price of gold make the stock market look dull. Invest in real estate? That turned out well, didn’t it?
Of course, the “third leg” of the retirement stool (along with SS and our own savings) was originally designed to be our companies’ defined-benefit pension plans. Except that back in the '80s and '90s, the company pension plan turned into a defined-contribution 401K system, which tanked along with our own individual savings.
With all due respect to the “make your own decisions” argument, a lot of the choices we were presented with at the time would have ALL turned out to be wrong (in the sense of coming out ahead when retirement time rolled around.)
To be precise, they screwed you before you entered the workforce. You never had the promise of retiring at 65 with full SS benefits. You only thought you did.
I somewhat agree. I’d say no cap at all on taxing earnings. Why should there be? There’s no cap on Income Tax, in fact the opposite.
But yes, there should be some mild increases in SS retirement ages.
“fun, travel and topnotch medical care”- I think you badly over estimate what Soc Sec pays or what Medicare covers.
So then for you, there was no change. The change occured before you had even contributed a nickel. You might as well get angry about the original bill back in 1935. “grrr”:rolleyes:
I’m not talking about SS or medicare, not by themselves anyway. In spite of what AARP would have us all believe, the elderly in America are not all scrapping by on Social Security, eating cat food and living in cardboard boxes. As a group they are very well off and yet, they are also reaping the greatest returns on their Social Security “investments.”
“As a group” maybe, but a good number are scraping by with nothing but SocSec, which is hard to do.
More like, I’m angry that this information never found its way to me until I was well into my 30s. Prior to that, all information I’d seen, heard, read, or been told indicated that 65 was retirement age and not until I’d been working a good 15 years did I finally learn that, in fact, there is another retirement age that takes effect eventually, but nobody ever talks about it. You have to read that SSA statement to catch it. Turn on CNN: you won’t hear a single talking head mention that the retirement age has already been raised once. Everyone (on TV) acts like we’re talking about jumping from 65 straight to 70. I’ve been yelling at the TV in frustration because I keep waiting for someone to point this out. I bet there’s a bunch of people out there my age and younger who don’t read their SSA statements every year and have no idea they have to work two more years than their parents did.
And you’re a journalism major?
I was born in 1951. You are probably going to live longer than I will, and be healthier, so I’m not too impressed by your complaining about retirement age. You’ll also find that your SSA payments depends on your contributions, until you hit the cap. You might well discover that you don’t get enough to retire on even when you hit the proper age. BTW, if you study the stuff you get from the gummint, you’ll see you get less if you retire early and more if you put it off. But you can retire anytime you have enough money, even if you don’t start your SSA benefits. That implies saving something, which is a good idea no matter what the retirement age is.
As has been mentioned, physical stamina isn’t much of a part of the job I have. Plus, with my experience and the library of software I have accumulated, I can program twice as fast as someone twenty years younger than me. My health may not be quite as good, but on the other hand I don’t have to take time off for sick kids.
When employment comes back, raising the retirement age might be good for this group. Lots of companies don’t want to hire older people because they feel they will not stay long enough to pay back the training investment. With a higher retirement age, this is less of an issue.
What’s that supposed to imply, that because I studied journalism for a minute back in the 1980s, I’m supposed to know everything about everything, including SSA policy changes like raising the retirement age? Journalism major doesn’t even mean I’ve ever worked as a reporter, nor does it mean that all journalism majors are up to speed on any possible topic. There’s a million different subjects one could study and report on and be knowledgeable about; I can’t possibly know about it all.